Before I get to packing for my red eye to Boston for Mashup Camp, which I’m really looking forward to (Camp, not the red eye), a couple of updates for interested parties on some technology related items that have been mentioned both recently and not.
Feedburner / WordPress Issues
First mentioned back in December, this issue was simple: Feedburner and WordPress couldn’t seem to play nicely together. After cutting over to WordPress, Feedburner continued to report issues every time it picked up the feed. Fortunately, Alex pointed me to a fix here. Having made the code changes recommended in that entry (which won’t be necessary >= 2.0.7), I’m happy to report that the issue appears to be resolved. That’s good.
ZRM MySQL Restore Issues
As reported over the weekend, while I was able to successfully configure ZRM to back up our Mediawiki and WordPress MySQL databases, I was unable to successfully restore them. After some assistance from the very helpful kkg and paddy over at the Zmanda forums, we were able to establish that the issue wasn’t what I thought, but insufficient permissions. Given that I granted the precise permissions recommended in the piece, it was clear that this was a documentation error. It’s always interesting to me to see how quickly a community or vendor update inaccurate documentation. How’d Zmanda do? It’s already fixed. Kudos, guys. This is also good.
One quick additional note on the ZRM front. If, like me, you’re interested in backing up your backups to S3 and followed the instructions previously linked to, you may find that you’re unable to copy the assets because no one but root has access to the backups. There’s an easy fix for this: create another copy of the script, this one pointing to the database directories, and stick in the root user’s crontab. On Ubuntu, that’s an easy sudo crontab -e (there should already be mysql-zrm jobs in there, assuming you’ve scheduled automatic backup).
Feedburner Feedflare Issue
Feedburner very helpfully provides a couple of widget-like features that can be added to your feed and/or your blog. I’m interested in two in particular: one that displays del.icio.us links to the item in question, and one that displays the current comment number. In theory, it should be simple to add these via Feedburner’s web interface, but having done that they’re still not displaying in my feed. I searched the Feedburner forums quickly, but only ran across complaints that it wasn’t showing on the blog, which isn’t my problem. I just want them in my feed. If anybody has any ideas, I’m all ears. This is bad. Well, sort of bad.
Eclipse Package Management Problems
I haven’t commented on the package management question in a little while, and promise to remedy that soon as there’s some news worth discussing. In the meantime, however, I wanted to note that I’ve been having escalating problems with Eclipse’s package management. It all started when I installed PyDev alongside of the PHP IDE, with RDT and RadRails already on there (which was an ordeal in and of itself, only remedied by Bill Higgins’ access to the RR devs). The package management (Help: Software Updates: Find and Install, in case you don’t know what I’m talking about) functionality began to complain about missing packages, which was suboptimal. Now, however, I’m receiving errors on open and as mentioned cannot even remove the offending packages. I’m considering blowing away my Eclipse instance and starting over. This is bad.
And as long as we’re talking about Eclipse package management, it’d be great if they could add dependency handling and management. Being told that I need a package without knowing what it is or where it’s located is a drag. Or perhaps this has already been addressed? I’m on 3.2.1.
S3 Upload Beginning
45+ gigabytes has just started to upload to S3 via JungleDisk, and the application tells me it’s uploading at 87kb/sec. Given that I have verified uploading speeds of 700 (which at least is close the 768 promised, unlike my download speeds which are 3K rather than the 6 I’m paying for), I’m not sure what’s going on. I did not use JungleDisk’s bandwidth throttling feature, so I’m assuming that the issue is on S3’s side. It’s reporting 6 days to complete the upload, which is not good – AKA bad.
One Last Thing
Following my bout over vacation with several months of mail, I was forcibly confronted with the obscene amount of junk mail I receive. In an attempt to remedy this, I’ve given in and signed up with Greendimes for a three month trial at $3/mo plus change. The service, if you’re unfamiliar with it, contacts junk mail organizations on your behalf and removes you from their lists. They also plant a tree a month in your name. It’s a small price to pay just for the trees, but if they can reduce my mail volume it’ll be worth its weight in gold. Will let you know how I fare.
